best of my judgment, discharge the duties of the office with that
impartiality and zeal for the public good, which ought never to suffer
connection of blood or friendship to intermingle so as to have the least
sway on the decision of a public nature." This position was held to
firmly. John Adams wrote an office-seeker, "I must caution you, my dear
Sir, against having any dependence on my influence or that of any other
person. No man, I believe, has influence with the President. He seeks
information from all quarters, and judges more independently than any man
I ever knew. It is of so much importance to the public that he should
preserve this superiority, that I hope I shall never see the time that any
man will have influence with him beyond the powers of reason and
argument."

Long after, when political strife was running high, Adams said,
"Washington appointed a multitude of democrats and jacobins of the deepest
die. I have been more cautious in this respect; but there is danger of
proscribing under imputations of democracy, some of the ablest, most
influential, and best characters in the Union." In this he was quite
correct, for the first President's appointments were made with a view to
destroy party and not create it, his object being to gather all the talent
of the country in support of the national government, and he bore many
things which personally were disagreeable in an endeavor to do this.

Twice during Washington's terms he was forced to act counter to the public
sentiment. The first time was when a strenuous attempt was made by the
French minister to break through the neutrality that had been proclaimed,
when, according to John Adams, "ten thousand people in the streets of
Philadelphia, day after day, threatened to drag Washington out of his
house, and effect a revolution in the government, or compel it to declare
in favor of the French revolution and against England." The second time
was when he signed the treaty of 1795 with Great Britain, which produced a
popular outburst from one end of the country to the other. In neither case
did Washington swerve an iota from what he thought right, writing, "these
are unpleasant things, but they must be met with firmness." Eventually the
people always came back to their leader, and Jefferson sighed over the
fact that "such is the popularity of the President that the people will
support him in whatever he will do or will not do, without appealing to
their own reason o